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Playing Simon Says at Airport Security

IN general, I don’t take orders from anyone except (as a matter of prudence) my wife. So the last time I was in an airport and security agents started bellowing, “Freeze!” I simply carried on with my business of buying a box of chocolates at a pushcart a few dozen feet away from the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint area.

I was immediately upbraided, not by a security officer, but by a fellow passenger. Like dozens of other travelers near the checkpoint, he had abruptly halted in place, on command, as if playing a children’s game.

“You’re supposed to freeze!” the guy growled at me as he stood motionless in the frozen tableau of the reflexively compliant.

But wait a minute: Am I really supposed to freeze? At many airports, T.S.A. officers conduct occasional drills in which the agents suddenly start screaming things like “Code Bravo! Freeze!” The drills, which the T.S.A. tells me happen only once or twice a year at any given airport, are intended to give the officers experience in what happens if there is a security breach. The goal is to train them in how to quickly shut down a checkpoint and, once the potential threat is resolved, get it up and running again in a timely manner.

“These drills are generally conducted during off-peak hours to minimize disruption, and generally last a minute,” said Kristin Lee, a spokeswoman for the agency. The agency conducts a range of security exercises, not all of them in public, to train checkpoint officers, she said.

Understood, I said. But still, am I, a citizen, required to stop motionless when the T.S.A. officers yell “freeze”?

Actually, no. The agency has “wide-ranging legal authority to carry out security-related responsibilities,” Ms Lee said. But in these specific drills, she added, “passengers are not required to ‘freeze’ in place like statues.” But if they are within the checkpoint security area, they may be required to remain there until the drill has ended, she said.

Photo

Credit
Chris Gash

Sounds reasonable enough to me. But, as we all know, T.S.A. policies, as enunciated in Washington, are not always followed precisely to the letter. After all, there are security checkpoints at some 450 airports, where nearly two million passengers go through screening every day.

On the two occasions that I have experienced the freeze drill — once at the Los Angeles airport and, more recently, at Atlanta — it was clear to me that travelers believed they were required to stop and stand motionless — even those who had cleared security and were merely within shouting distance of the checkpoint. Officers seemed to reinforce that impression, too.

The freeze issue has been getting more attention lately. On Wewontfly.com, a Web site started last year in opposition to certain T.S.A. procedures, including the more aggressive body pat-downs, a woman commented that she was recently involved in a freeze drill at the Atlanta airport.

“As we were going through the security checkpoint, one of the supervisors suddenly yelled ‘freeze!’ ” she wrote. “Everyone was forced to just stand there for about a minute. We were not allowed to move, fidget, look around, speak, nothing.”

George Donnelly, who co-founded the Web site, described the drills as “like they’re playing a game of freeze tag.” His site calls on people unable to find alternatives to flying to “opt out” of the so-called full-body scanners, and object loudly if the resulting body pat-down seems inappropriate.

Anyone who regularly reads this column knows that I am not shy about criticizing the T.S.A. for capricious overreach, and for unnecessarily heavy-handed hassling of the flying public. On the other hand, I realize that the agency is often pushed and pulled publicly, in ways that can distract from its real missions: intelligent risk assessment and vigilance about threats from liquid explosives.

But can we at least chill, as it were, over the issue of freezing? The security agency can certainly make it more clear to the public and to its screeners what the drill entails. Basically, a drill to freeze the checkpoint means that movement through and in the checkpoint stops. We travelers are not really required to freeze in place.

“I kind of scratch my head on this,” said James Babb, the other co-founder of Wewontfly.com. “All I can think of is obedience training. I kind of know what to expect from the T.S.A., but really on this, my frustration is with the public that says, ‘Oh, an authority figure said freeze, so I’d better freeze,’ and not ask reasonable questions.”

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2011, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Playing Simon Says At Airport Security. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe